Dither Play Laurie Spiegel

When Laurie Spiegel composed the music that ultimately became The Expanding Universe in 1980, she never imagined human beings playing it. A student of both Julliard and Bell Laboratories, she was both programmer and composer, building her affable and immersive electronic music on room-sized computers with drives as big as telephone books. “I was fascinated by the processes, structures and sounds,” said Spiegel, a true pioneer of electronic music whose importance is finally being understood. “I never gave much thought to whether this music could be performed live by human musicians.” When the guitar quartet Dither approached her for permission to arrange this music for four guitars, all played lived, she had her doubts. “To my delight,” Spiegel continued, “they proved my doubts wrong and have come through with one amazing performance after another.”

For nearly 20 years, Dither— Taylor Levine, Joshua Lopes, James Moore, and Brendon Randall-Myers—have been doing the seemingly impossible with their electric guitars. On their 2019 wonder, Potential Differences, they captured one of James Tenney’s luminous microtonal works and the serial complexity of Eve Beglarian’s four-part canon, Garden of Cyrus. They recorded striking versions of John Zorn’s musical games on 2015’s Olympiad Vol. 1 and have repeatedly performed Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint by expanding to 13 guitars. A quartet of composers, they also perform their own work, including the heavy metal-informed Dynamics of Vanishing Bodies by Randall-Myers, the newest member. With Dither’s eight hands and abundance of pedals, the folk music origins and classical warmth of Spiegel’s computer music become clear, reanimating work she believed would never live outside of the machine.